


Things We Lost (Will Lose) in the Fire

by UrbanAmazon



Category: Terminator (Movies), Terminator Genisys (2015)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Paternal angst, Photographs, time travel messes with your head
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-03
Updated: 2015-07-03
Packaged: 2018-04-07 12:47:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4263771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UrbanAmazon/pseuds/UrbanAmazon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kyle Reese and photographs.  And time-travel.  And mourning.   Post-Gensisys.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things We Lost (Will Lose) in the Fire

_**STOLEN FUTURE**  
Cyberdyne and the world mourn the loss of the “most visionary mind of a generation” - a TIME magazine exclusive._

It’s November, 2017, and Kyle spots the headline as he pays for gas (still with cash, as neither he nor Sarah can really warm to the idea of a computer’s wireless access to money). He sees the words and reads them, but the cover is a picture of John Connor and Kyle’s mind just… stops. He can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t hear anything but the rushing roar inside his head until the clerk reaches over and pokes his shoulder. “Hey, buddy? Your change. Come on, man, I’ve got a line here.”

He pulls a copy of the magazine and leaves a five dollar bill behind. 

He jams the rolled-up glossy pages down the side of the driver’s side door when he gets back to the truck. Sarah finishes loading the filled gas cans and smiles at him when they lock eyes through the rear-view mirror. She smiles more often now. Kyle knows he should focus on that, on how every curve of her lips pulls the same shape on his own, but all he can notice is that she and John have the same eyes.

Have. Had. _Will have._

Kyle’s vision blurs and he blinks it away as he turns the keys and Sarah slides in on the passenger side. “Seatbelt, Kyle,” she reminds him.

The sun is at its highest point by the time they get back to the cabin, but the morning frost still lingers in the shadows under the eaves. Pops is already on the roof, working on stripping the wooden shingles and flinging them with laser-guided accuracy at the dumpster sitting in the gravel driveway. The gas cans go in the freshly-built garage, a safe distance from the bundles of lumber delivered the previous week. 

It’s not the Reese family home Kyle dreamed of finding and rebuilding with his own hands, but the owner of the property knows the foreman from Pops’ last construction job, and she lets them camp there as part of the labor agreement. They work the rest of the afternoon to finish stripping the last of the old shingles away.

The evening brings a sharp chill as soon as the sun sinks below the treeline. Sarah chops vegetables to grill over the camping stove, and Kyle slips back to the truck. The glossy pages are cold and stiff in his hands. He sits on the ground beside the front tire (shoulders hunching forward to hide his body mass behind the protective circle) and balances a small flashlight between his shoulder and his neck so he can see.

John is smiling. The left side of his face is turned away, hiding the memory of those harsh scars that nearly cost him an eye, and the blue-white glow of a Genisys server behind him softens that sharp profile, that pointed nose. There’s lines at the corners of his eyes, and under them. There’s the start of gray in his hair.

It’s strange, seeing John’s face in a photograph. Perhaps it’s just as odd as seeing Sarah in flesh and blood. 

Flesh and blood.

_‘Dad,’ John said, so easily, and all the air in Kyle’s lungs just… stopped being there._

Kyle draws a breath as he opens the magazine, flicks to the cover story. His hands do not shake, but the flashlight’s beam trembles. Why the hell is he doing this? The story’s not about John Connor. It’s about a liar, a machine with John’s stolen face. It’s not him. It’s not--

_**Those Left Behind - a special interview by Julie McCullough.** “John Connor saved my life.” Danny Dyson hasn’t slept in 36 hours. His phone buzzes at least once every three minutes during the course of this interview, but he does not answer it so long as the conversation is focused on his late friend and business partner. “I don’t mean that to exaggerate - he made me love what I did again, he helped me rediscover all the wonder of what mankind once dreamed as mere science fiction, and that is as vital as any other part of surviving. I might have been the face of Genisys, but John was the heart. He inspired people, no matter the odds, no matter the project. Nothing was impossible with John.”_

Kyle lets out a breath he doesn’t remember holding. It’s wrong, and he knows it’s wrong. There’s another photograph of John with Danny Dyson, their white shirts creased at the elbows as they lean forward over a mess of wires and circuits that probably mean something to a machine. The caption below dates the image as 2014. It’s not John, it’s _not,_ but it _is_ ; Kyle remembers the same line in John’s brow when he was frustrated by a Skynet battle plan, leaning over a map to stab a new objective into the paper. John’s right _there._

His best friend. His _son._

_**Portraits of a Prophet - text and photographs curated by Andrei Veijou.** On paper, no one can give any real story to where John Connor came from before he appeared on the California advanced-sciences map. Self-taught through a plethora of science courses offered online from international universities, he crossed paths with Cyberdyne’s father-son team Miles and Danny Dyson at a corporate meet-and-greet in 2014. In a matter of weeks, he was meeting with the board of directors. In three months, he and the Dysons proposed Genisys, the mobile operating system that would have unified over a billion people around the world. _

_Last month, both Genisys and Connor were lost in an explosion that authorities have yet to fully explain._

_As the technology world reels from the destruction of the Cyberdyne Research & Development campus, TIME reporter Andrei Veijou spoke with those that worked closest to Connor, who mourn the loss of their leader and friend. _

It’s not John. The photographs are _not_ John. Kyle repeats it over and over in his head; he has to. John never smiled at a friend’s camera in a lab, leaning back in an office chair until it should have tipped over. John never lifted a glass of beer alongside his team of programmers at a Genisys launch party. 

_Jianxhi Lo, coder - “Whenever we hit a bug, or a delay, John was there to keep us going. He kept our spirits up. He would find a solution we hadn’t even considered, breaking everything we’d learned in a textbook. Every time someone in upper management tried to circulate a memo about ‘thinking outside the box’, John would re-circulate it with the text crossed out. He’d write ‘cheat’ instead.”_

Kyle flinches. The skin on his back crawls, a chill spreading over every inch not made numb by scars. He has to close his eyes and breathe. It’s not John.

_Marcia Keyes, Genisys intern - “John said that everything he ever learned was from a computer, and working on Genisys was a way to return the favor. He taught me so much.”_

The nausea punches Kyle in the stomach like a bullet. He presses his lips together and remains silent. Noise is a luxury he’s never really known. His skin is cold but his eyes burn.

_Miles Dyson, senior software developer - “We only knew him for a short time, but he changed our lives. John was family.”_

The magazine falls from Kyle’s fingers. It lands and the pages slide like slippery metal to the last page of the article, with one last portrait that spans the full page. John’s facing the camera, with the dark shadows of unknown architecture behind, and his solemn face is lit with a pale blue light. It’s _not_ John… but it’s so very much like Kyle’s last memory from 2029 that his throat closes up.

 _Every hair on his body prickled with the sheer power shaking the air. His teeth rattled in his skull as his feet lifted from the ground, and Kyle thought his head might split from the pressure. For a moment, the words_ ‘no going back’ _flitted through his mind like a bad joke. It was the kind of thing that would make John snort and roll his eyes, and Kyle looked for him in the crowd._

_John was there, watching. He didn’t flinch or look away when the coalescing sphere spat an arc of lightning across its surface. He looked… tired. A little sad._

_Kyle wondered why that felt familiar._

_Then John’s fierce eyes went wide with alarm as the metal touched his skin, and that tired and hopeful smile turned to pain. He looked at Kyle, locked eyes with him through the crackling cage that held Kyle back, and Kyle saw fear as the time machine ripped him away from his friend._

Kyle reaches down to touch the slick magazine page, rubbing the corner with his thumb. 

_His son._ He watched his son die.

There it is - that’s the thought that slips through his ribs and wraps around his heart until Kyle doesn’t know whether he can’t breathe or just doesn’t want to. He puts a hand over his mouth to stay quiet, but the sting of tears sear his eyes as they track down his face. 

This is not the memory he wants. He wants the sour smell of moonshine with his eyebrows tingling and John laughing as they brush smoking metal bits off their clothes. He wants the impressive stream of curse words that John let out when Kyle nearly crashed his first helicopter, and the suffering grin when he caught Kyle working hard at the damaged dashboard of his second. He wants the freezing nights in the sentry’s nest, when John’s voice in his earpiece would keep him awake with stories about the great Sarah Connor, and Kyle would sneak quick glances at the photograph he kept in his chest pocket to keep him going, keep him warm. He wants… he--

Kyle wants his friend back. He slaps the magazine closed, and the words on the cover keep mocking him. 

_and the world mourn the loss_

This world will never mourn the real John Connor, ever. Kyle finally lets out a noise, a wet and sucking gasp like a chest wound that won’t ever heal, as the weight of mourning a whole _world_ crushes down on his shoulders.

The soft brush of a jacket against the truck’s metal has Kyle snapping back to the present. He reaches for the gun that isn’t at the small of his back, but it’s only Sarah. The burst of adrenaline fades into the ether and Kyle sags back--

She’s holding a TIME magazine in her hands.

Her boots crunch the cold and dying grass flat as she comes to sit beside Kyle. Her head barely reaches the crest of the wheel well. Kyle breathes, and she smells like campfire smoke and freshly split wood. Sarah leans against Kyle’s shoulder, and Kyle leans back as they stare down at the twin pictures of their son on the glossy paper, lit by Kyle’s flashlight. 

Sarah breaks the silence, and Kyle can feel the hitch in her breath just before the words come. “When my parents died, I had nothing left of them. We ran, and I didn’t even get to keep a photograph. Pops had a few of me, so he could find me, but we couldn’t risk going back to the cabin.” She stops a moment, like she has to gather her courage to share the words. “And when I thought I lost Pops, I thought _I don’t have any pictures of him, either_.

“Then today, I saw this. It fell out of the car next to us when the guy was looking for his phone. You’d just left to go pay. I didn’t really think, I just… stole it. It’s stupid. I know it’s not him, but I wondered if it might have given me a little more about who he was. Will be, I don’t know - the real John.” She laughs, soft and nervous. “Look at me, I’m shaking. I can’t even open it.”

Kyle takes her hand. She is shaking, but she squeezes his fingers tight.

“You were reading it.” Sarah waits for Kyle to nod, small and hurting. “Is it right at all? Was John this sort of person?” She runs her fingers over her stolen copy of the line of John’s cheek, over ‘ _most visionary mind_ ’ like the ink might bleed away. 

It’s easier to lie, to say that the machine was flawed and the Skynet lied with every word, except it’s _Sarah_. Kyle feels the beat of her heart where her fingers are trapped against his own, and his mind can trace the line and curve of her brow and her eyelashes like a map in the dark. “Yeah,” he says, and his voice is still cracked and empty. “Everyone… we trusted him. Believed in him when nothing else worked. He never gave up.”

Kyle finds the flashlight and thumbs it off. There’s stars overhead and the campfire on the other side of the truck, but it’s too dark to see the photographs anymore. Sarah ducks under his arm and he holds her tightly to his chest until… until--

There’s no _until._ They’re making up the future as they go.

And John Connor, the son and the friend Kyle knew, is a ghost. 

***

The next morning, breakfast is waiting for them by the rekindled fire. Pops pours out two coffees from the kettle and sets them by the steaming bowls of oatmeal and fresh apples. He looks at Sarah and Kyle both in that way that Kyle can never really read but feels he recognizes, somehow. 

The machine pulls a folded piece of brown paper from his pocket to hand to Kyle. “You require this,” he says, then turns and heads to the lumber pile to start working.

Kyle unfolds the paper, and all the air in his lungs… stops. It’s a drawing of John, the real John, crisp and precise as an identification scan by a machine’s hand holding a carpenter’s pencil. The scars are there, and Sarah’s fierce eyes, and the shape of his jaw that Kyle sees in the mirror every morning. Time stops, and twists in Kyle’s head, and keeps going, over and over until he’s dizzy.

Kyle’s knees hit the ground, and Sarah’s beside him, holding him until he can breathe again.


End file.
